Cheap, Legal O’Reilly Books

As Featured On Lifehacker

Want a cheap O’Reilly programming book? Buy the iOS App from iTunes (it doesn’t matter whether you have an iPhone or not, and most of their books are around $5 as apps) and simply unzip the .ipa file on your computer.

Poke around in the folders, and you’ll find the whole text of the book stored as plain html files — ready for reading on any device or computer.

Quite the steal, considering their Kindle editions sell for about three times as much, and there’s no DRM on HTML

You might even find an easter egg like I did in my PHP5 book. Upon unzipping it, I found an epub version of The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland … presumably to just eat up space and make the app appear bigger.